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Movie executives at Lionsgate have filed a lawsuit against the anonymous individuals who leaked an advance copy of Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables 3 online.

The action comes just one week after the movie bosses learned that a digital file containing a high quality reproduction of the film had been stolen and uploaded to the Internet.

The new lawsuit, filed on Thursday (31Jul14), targets the operators behind multiple websites, including limetorrents.com, billionuploads.com and dotsemper.com.

The company's lawyer writes: "By downloading one of these 'torrent' files associated with the Stolen Film from , users join a 'swarm' where they download parts of the Stolen Film from many different users and also upload to other users parts of the Stolen Film they have already received, until eventually they have reproduced the entire Stolen Film on their own hard drives and in most cases have also uploaded all or a substantial part of the Stolen Film to others."

The plaintiff is demanding a temporary restraining order and injunctions that prohibit the anonymous operators of the sites from hosting, linking to, distributing, reproducing, performing, selling or making available copies of The Expendables 3. The requested injunction also seeks to have the defendants prohibited from "operating any of the websites" and ordered to "take all steps necessary to recall and recover all copies of the Stolen Film or any portion thereof that they have distributed".